Word: bruch
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Anorexia is a mystery disease; doctors disagree over practically everything about it. The leading expert on it is Dr. Hilde Bruch, who has been observing anorexics for more than 35 years and has written a book on them. Bruch has developed a psychological composite portrait of the typical anorexic victim: they were, she says, model children who behaved with robot-like obedience because they doubted their abilities to stand up for and assert themselves. Their dieting usually began inexplicably, following trivial remarks about their appearance or upon a change of environment, like going to camp or college. In new situations...
...dieting gets out of control, Bruch believes, because the anorexic expects it to bring about effectiveness and respect. Since no amount of weight loss can achieve these goals, the anorexic becomes frantic and pursues the diet with renewed fervor. The desire for control of one's life is replaced by the desire to control the body...
Family life plays the greatest role in Bruch's theory of who gets anorexia and why. "It is possible," she writes, "that the success, achievement, and appearance orientation of these families is in some way related to the patient's driving search for something that will earn him respect." Despite the apparent stability in the anorexic's home--very few come from broken homes--Bruch finds in the parents a deep disillusionment with each other. They are competing secretly to prove which is the better parent. The mother is likely to be an achievement-oriented woman, frustrated in her aspirations...
...exposure to education, athletics and the arts, they were not enouraged to think independently or to express their own feelings. Instead of relying on their own inner resources or autonomous decisions, they behaved with complete compliance to authority. When puberty demanded independence of the obedient anorexic child, he turned, Bruch writes, "to indiscriminate negativism...
Some doctors hospitalize anoretic patients and take away privileges like watching television till they gain weight. But, says Bruch, "they lose it again as soon as they leave." She believes that psychiatric therapy is necessary...